In about three weeks, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire will hit cinemas around the world. Excitement for the next installment of the THG universe is high, and a large part of it is due to the transmedia marketing strategy for Catching Fire, which consists mostly of a mix of social media, fan participation, and brand cooperations. Responsible for this unique marketing campaign is Ignition Creative, an LA-based ad agency. The marketing campaign for Catching Fire kicked off at the beginning of 2013, and over the course of the last months, we’ve been treated to increasing amounts of content from the THG world. Today, I’d like to

After attending last year’s amazing and truly impressive Storyworld 2011 Conference I was more than happy to be able to attend this year’s Storyworld in Hollywood as well. While it was great to see everybody again, the majority of the presentations and panels unfortunately had only very few new insights to offer. This may be due to a possible indecision among the organizers in terms of whether Storyworld should try to introduce transmedia as a concept to those who have heard little of it before, or whether it should foster a knowledge- and experience-exchange among the existing transmedia community. I

Last week I spent two days at this year’s re:publica conference (#rp12) in Berlin. re:publica conferences focus on all kinds of issues around the web, in particular on blogging, social media, and digital media’s effect on society. This year, re:publica’s topic strands included law & politics, education, innovation, civil action, health, and entertainment, and how each of these areas have been impacted by recent developments in digital media.

[NB: While I’m talking specifically about the (US) TV industry in this post, the principle of direct global distribution to reach the global audience is applicable for pretty much any medium that can be digitized.] In this blog, I have again and again referred to a variety of trends that currently impact entertainment consumption around the world immensely. I will not go into detail on each of these because I have done so before, but I will compile them in a quick re-cap so we’re all on the same page:

In this post I would like to draw your attention to three current entertainment trends that you must bear in mind when developing transmedia projects: 1. The growing movie market in the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries; 2. the exponential growth of new media in large parts of the world; and 3. the resulting changing media consumption pattern amongst audiences.

This is the fourth part of my ‘Why Transmedia?’ series. Please click to go to Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. Finally: Transmedia has a Global Appeal We’re only two-thirds through 2011, and already we can see a definite trend, particularly in the movie industry: The international success of your franchise can make or break it. Unlike North America and Europe, states such as the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) countries have entertainment markets that are still growing exponentially.